June 21, 2017

Bigclive shows us what is inside a Arbra Dynamite Exploder. The unit is completely powered by the turn handle. It is actually quite nice since it will indicate that the circuit resistance is when the handle is spun. The max firing voltage is around 1000 volts. To fire you simply press the fire button as turning the handle while pressing the fire button. When the fire voltage is reached the unit dumps the built voltage onto the output to allow any pyro devises to be fired.

June 10, 2017

Jeremy Cook built this walking robot using a bunch of custom cut Polycarbonate for legs and gears. The brain is Arduino based and GoPro camera in the head. The motors are controlled via a few off the shelf H-Bridge modules. Controlling the robot is done via bluetooth. Lots of time and thought went into this robot creation and it shows. It looks great walking around the beach .

June 8, 2017

Rachel Dipirro and Jonathan Lo made an interesting Talking Multimeter Project for their Cornell University ECE 4760 Final Project. The multimeter is built around a PIC32MX250F128B. This is not a robust product that will be replacing your desktop multimeter since the range is not that great. For example it can just read resistance between 0 and 50K and voltage up to 10 volts. This range is fine for lots of work and the measurement front end could easily be swapped out with a high resolution ADC to greatly enhance this.

The multicolor LCD display is a great way to display the output and the number pad is perfect to control the system but of course the heart of this project is the voice output. The speech synthesis is performed by transmitting data to an external Microchip MCP4822 SPI DAC, the samples that are played are 16kHz samples that were compressed and stored onto system flash.